The ambitious plan of the government to dot the country with 100 smart cities could draw a leaf or two from the book of Infosys, India’s second largest IT services exporter, which plans to transform its 350 acres Mysore centre into a smart campus by April 2015.
By PP Thimmaya
The Infosys Mysore campus is a mini-city in itself with 12 million sq. ft. built-up area and the capacity to host more than 15,000 trainees (residing on campus), 8,000 plus employees and several thousand contract workers.
Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, who recently met Prime Minister Narendra Modi offering the company’s expertise in building smart cities said, “We, at Infosys, deeply believe that the digital revolution creates opportunities for us to reshape the world around us for the better and to improve quality of life. With our experience in computing technologies, and in managing urban spaces totalling over 2,600 acres, with a built-up area of 39 million sq. ft., all over India, our model ecosystem at Mysore will serve as a live, replicable example of smart city innovations that will harness all the advantages of digitisation.”
Infosys will strive towards making its Mysore campus a ‘Smart City’ through effective planning to ensure efficient resource governance and utilisation. The campus will be the first to achieve zero waste to landfill sustainability, it said. The IT major’s smart city initiatives will also be focused on rejuvenation of the water capacity and has already built a reservoir in Mysore with a capacity of 40 million litres.
According to the company’s sustainability report for 2013-14, it has spent considerable time in evaluating different waste management strategies to meet the goal of reducing the waste going into landfills. It has set up three different technologies for biogas treatment, funded research on low grade plastic treatment and found a solution for managing the mercury from fluorescent tubes. It also hopes to share these successful case studies in the public domain.
Given Infosys prowess in technology, it is expected that there will be the use of advance technologies like artificial intelligence and automation to create smart city solutions. For example, the smart buildings of Infosys use inbuilt artificial intelligence and energy saving algorithms to constantly optimise operations on the go and build high level diagnostics.
Infosys has always been conscious about environmental sustainability encompassing its employees, customers and the larger eco-system. The sustainability report has also showcased some of its major achievements like 34.5% reduction in water intensity, 43.6% reduction in electricity intensity, 75.6 million units of electricity consumed from renewable sources, 3.4 million square feet of highest rated green buildings and the list goes on.
Rohan Parikh, Head—green initiatives and infrastructure, Infosys, said, “Our key to success continues to be our ability to try and test new ideas in our campuses. Almost every new building built over the last six years is functioning as a live lab, where we are capturing information about the performance of new technology and feeding it back to the scientific community to accelerate their research. We will continue on this path and we want other individuals and organisations to join us in this journey to a greener future.”